 Hello there! I'm Sandy Alnok and today I'm going to do something really weird. I'm going to make a feminine shark Christmas card with this cute set from A-Rielle. We always tend to make blue water for fish to swim in and I am going to do something different because I saw this on the Googles and I thought it would be kind of fun to use it as an inspiration point for my card for today. Trying to make something that's more girly and here we go. So I'm going to begin with some twilight ink from Catherine Pooler and I just stamped the image almost in the center-ish of the paper and this is on cold-pressed watercolor paper and I'm going to paint all the way around it with water. You might wonder why I've been doing that a bit lately when I do these backgrounds and it's for your benefit. A lot of times I don't do that when I do my own painting because I paint pretty quickly but especially if you don't paint quickly you need to be able to keep your water on the page. You have to keep the page wet for things to blend because the biggest problem most people have is that the paint dries out and then you get hard edges and you try to fix them and on and on and on. If you paint water across the paper and when you start out it can be puddled but then by the time you add color to it it should be still wet and shiny but not puddled. Then you end up able to move the color around a little bit easier. So here I'm just going to use I'm using a big number 12 brush to paint some color all the way around the entire outside of the image. I'm being really careful along the the shark side. I want those shark edges to be very sharp. The tree I'm going to add my own softer edges to the tree so I don't have to worry about as much. So you're going to see me get a little bit messier when it gets to that portion. The palette that I'm using this time is not one that I show here very often. I don't use it very much. I try not to say hey you need to get all these colors because I have a gajillion colors and I hardly ever use them. I use the colors that are in my chosen palette that I use for all of my videos because that way if you get the colors that I have then we're painting the same kind of a way and I don't want you to feel like you have to shop all the time. But I haven't played with my Primitech colors in forever. It's been ages and I wanted to have a good pink to do this background with. This one isn't quite as warm as the pink in the sample card but it's got some texture to it and when you're trying to do a big background like this sometimes having something that has granulation that texture is going to actually make it look like a little smoother of a background because of the way that the paint goes on and lays down and I'm using Rodanite Genuine. That's the color here and I'll play around with it a little bit more and add another layer of color to make sure there's enough pink in there so that white pen is going to show up because I'm going to add some white later. I'm not going to add white watercolor because that's just a whole lot of labor and when we're talking about a card it doesn't absolutely need to be watercolor. If I were doing a painting I don't use white pen in my painting that's when I switch to either white watercolor or white watercolor grounds to add white things but on a card not really worried about it. So the edges of the shark on the right are nice and sharp and the edges on the tree on the left I'm not worried about because I can paint my tree right over top. I'm going to dry the whole thing but I'm drying it not just one section at a time. If you dry one section at a time you're going to end up with hard edges. So keep the heat moving around the entire thing so that it dries relatively evenly. There's still a few places where it's not perfect but I'm going to be adding bubbles in there so I decided not to worry about it. Probably could have fussed around with tilting the paper more in order to get the color to move perfectly and you know so what that was not a huge issue for this particular card. I'm painting the shark in hematite another one of the primatec colors and it is going to have a little bit of texture to it. Now there is no law that says you can't use primatec along with the regular colors absolutely none. I do have a couple of primatecs in my regular palette. I just don't have a ton of them but since I had this palette out I decided to use it for the whole thing. I'm also doing this one with the no-line kind of look because that's what my sample card had. It didn't have a big heavy black outline on that Santa and reindeer so that's what I was trying for here but I do have another card sample that I will show you at the end where you can see the difference between using black ink or using this really soft ink and just for purposes of saving anybody who tries this I use the Catherine Pooler Twilight ink to do the stamping and I let it dry really well. It dried overnight so I didn't even actually bother doing this card till the next day because a lot of inks may not work really well for watercolor so just because I use that on this one doesn't mean that I'm saying hey this is like the best one to use for watercolor. It's not necessarily a waterproof or water color safe type of ink. Now it can work and here on this card it didn't bother me at all. I didn't have any problem with that that ink rewetting or anything. Sharks have white tummies of course so I'm gonna have a mostly white tummy although I am gonna add a wash of color later so that he has a little bit of gray underneath of there. Give him a little bit of that. You could also for some of the details like this his big smile in his eye I'm doing that detail with my paintbrush but you could also do that with a pen and might be a little bit easier for most people because it takes a lot of practice to get control with any kind of a brush. This one is a silver black velvet brush and you know it's just it's one of those that's real hard to get that fine control and fine detail with so you do need to do some practicing but here you can see I added that little bit of gray shadow underneath of him and it gives him just a tiny bit of dimension adding a little extra shadow underneath of the hat. So there's just a little tiny bit in there. Now next up I am going to paint the hat. I debated whether I should make the hat red and then I decided no I want to see what this jadeite color is gonna look like so I made his hat green he's got a green hat on and not red so I am going to end up adding red into the tree but what I realized as soon as I started painting that green hat was that I had to figure out how to make the tree look different from the hat because now I have the green tree and the green hat to be painted in one card. A red hat might have been a little bit easier but there you go. I'm using the rhodonite for the ornaments on my little my little Christmas tree and then I used the hematite again for the tree trunk. The color that I chose to use for the tree itself is a color that's in my regular palette and this one is called green appetite and you can see the green is very different it's much darker it's much more of a yellow green the jadeite is more of a blue green color so the two of them do separate visually but I was very conscious of making that tree darker than I might have otherwise just to make sure that it separated from the hat so it didn't all blend together into mush because you know mush is never a good thing but notice how I'm just making feathery edges on the outside of the tree I'm just making little brushstrokes and then the tree is solid for the most part on the inside so it's a way that you can make a tree look a little bit more realistic and since the green appetite is dark I can paint right over top of that really light pink background without having any real ill effects of it so got all that green painted in and then I'm gonna just add in a little bit of extra of the green dropped into the tree itself so I get rid of that place that the one area where painting over top of the pink caused a little bit of a problem is that that edge is then darker it's darker for one because it's collecting paint around the edge of the wet area but it's also darker because the green is going over the pink so just adding a little bit more of the green inside fix that just fine next up I took some very thin row tonight the pink color and started making some bubbles not all the bubbles that I'm going to do are going to be in the road tonight but I did it with a very pale pink and the longer I let it sit there and the closer it gets to dry the more they'll stay but if you paint bubbles tone on tone this way then you can take a paper towel or what I use is baby wipes so it's something that gives me a little softer edge and dab off some of that excess color and then it doesn't look like there's like pink measles floating around him it just looks like they're very soft bubbles floating around the area and especially once we add the white pen bubbles it's going to look even better in that way so I finished putting the panel onto a card base used a pink card base and popped it and then added the sentiment and embossed it in white embossing powder I'm dreaming of a great white Christmas which I thought was really cute for this and then started adding white snow or white bubbles around the shark some of them are actually open circles and some of them are just dots and I'm keeping it all in almost one column above and below the shark you could put it all over the entire card but you're taking away from the focal point when you do that in some of the open areas I'm making some snowflakes like on that vintage card which are basically glorified asterisks make a plus and an X and you've got one of these little snowflakey things and the final touch was to take those little strings and he has wrapped around him that are holding on to the tree and draw them back in over top of the tree so he's still got it strapped to his back I sort of wondered if he needed another couple of strings to hold it on there it looks pretty precarious but this other shark is the one that was stamped in black ink and one thing I noticed when I pulled out both cards is I hadn't put any bubbles in front of my shark so I added just a few in front of him and in front of the tree so that it would look like he's within the bubbles rather than in front of the bubbles so there you go my crazy Waco pink shark cards not sure anybody else has ever had a pink shark card in their life but somebody on my Christmas list is going to be getting these because I think they're really funny I might make some more maybe I'll make some with different colored water in them that'd be kind of fun all right you guys have a great day I will see you again very soon hit that like button subscribe if you're not already and I'll see you again soon with another video go make something beautiful talk to you later bye